This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and we’re making a start with the release of version 5.4.0 of our input schema with some long-awaited changes. This is the first in what will be a series of metadata schema updates.
What is in this update?
Publication typing for citations
This is fairly simple; we’ve added a ‘type’ attribute to the citations members supply. This means you can identify a journal article citation as a journal article, but more importantly, you can identify a dataset, software, blog post, or other citation that may not have an identifier assigned to it. This makes it easier for the many thousands of metadata users to connect these citations to identifiers. We know many publishers, particularly journal publishers, do collect this information already and will consider making this change to deposit citation types with their records.
Every year we release metadata for the full corpus of records registered with us, which can be downloaded for free in a single compressed file. This is one way in which we fulfil our mission to make metadata freely and widely available. By including the metadata of over 165 million research outputs from over 20,000 members worldwide and making them available in a standard format, we streamline access to metadata about scholarly objects such as journal articles, books, conference papers, preprints, research grants, standards, datasets, reports, blogs, and more.
Today, we’re delighted to let you know that Crossref members can now use ROR IDs to identify funders in any place where you currently use Funder IDs in your metadata. Funder IDs remain available, but this change allows publishers, service providers, and funders to streamline workflows and introduce efficiencies by using a single open identifier for both researcher affiliations and funding organizations.
As you probably know, the Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a global, community-led, carefully curated registry of open persistent identifiers for research organisations, including funding organisations. It’s a joint initiative led by the California Digital Library, Datacite and Crossref launched in 2019 that fulfills the long-standing need for an open organisation identifier.
We began our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organizations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country; our list of countries is predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA). Eligible members pay no membership or content registration fees. The list undergoes periodic reviews, as countries may be added or removed over time as economic situations change.
What do you think of when you think of Chicago? Deep dish pizza? Art Deco architecture?
Well for one week only this year you can add scholarly publishing to the list as the #SSP2018 Conference comes to town. Some Crossref people are excited to be heading out for the conference, and we’re looking forward to meeting as many of our members as possible.
Come along to stand 212A and talk to Anna Tolwinska about Participation Reports. Although this new tool is still in beta, she’s giving SSP attendees a sneak peek and the chance to get an early look at whether they (and over 10 000 other members) are registering the ten key elements that add context and richness to the basic required metadata. You’ll get real insight into what metadata you’re registering, even if this work is done by a third party or other department.
Thinking about registering preprints or including data citations? Want to find out more about our forthcoming Event Data service? Our product director Jennifer Lin will be able to give you the ins and outs of all our latest services so do keep an eye out for her at the conference.
Speaking of third parties, I’ll will be popping along to the “Thinking the Unthinkable, or How to Prepare for a Platform Migration” pre meeting seminar on Wednesday with copies of our new Platform Migration Checklist and lots of hints and tips to help form a new platform migration guide which will help members have a smooth transition when thinking of moving providers.
Shayn Smulyan will be attending the ORCID breakfast meeting on Thursday morning, so come and say hello if you have any questions about how ORCID and Crossref work together. Shayn is one of our support specialists, so he’ll be able to help you with any other technical queries you may have.
Our tech director Chuck Koscher will be keen to hone in on members’ advanced questions about Content Registration, citation matching, and any and all schema deets. So seek him out if you have deep technical questions.
Want to find out more about Metadata 2020, the new campaign to improve metadata for research? Rosa Morais Clark will be able to give you the lowdown, and even better - she has stickers!
And don’t feel left out if you aren’t a member but work closely with Crossref. Jennifer Kemp will be on hand to answer all your metadata use and reuse questions, she’ll be looking forward to chatting with all kinds of service providers, platforms, and tools.
